Tanzania Multi Stakeholder Map - WebNG

6.3 Non-Income Poverty
6.3.1 Education and illiteracy
While there has been a notable increase in primary school enrolments the pace
of transition to secondary schools is low especially for girls. Illiteracy remains
high. About 28.6 percent of Tanzanians cannot read and write in any language.
There is more illiteracy among women (36 percent) than men (20.4 percent). This
state of affairs has significant impact on sound management of chemicals. An
illiterate pesticide user is a potential victim of the pesticide.
6.3.2 Health services
Key obstacles include health care charges, long distances to health facilities,
inadequate and unaffordable transport systems, poor quality of care, weak
exemption and waiver system to the sick who unable to access health care by a
fee, shortage of skilled providers and poor governance and accountability
mechanisms. Poor health adversely affect efforts to eradicate poverty, since the
productive time is lost seeking health services, but also has monetary implication.
The other dimension is that even if the market may have a less toxic pesticide
e.g. X-Pel made from pyrethrums, the poor individual will go for a cheap
alternative which may have more health impacts and hence a poverty spiral.
6.3.3 Survival and nutrition
HIV prevalence rates show a worrying trend, particularly for women of young
age. HIV and AIDS pandemic have a wider implication for other indicators such
as life expectancy. It is also important to note that high rate of infant and child
mortality is due to continuing high prevalence of malaria. As for nutrition,
Tanzania has four nutritional disorders (i) protein energy malnutrition (PEM) (ii)
nutritional anemia (iii) iodine deficiency disorders (IDD) and (iv) vitamin A
deficiency (VAD). The challenges include increasing food intake by raising
feeding frequency and consumption of high energy dense foods, increasing
consumption of fruits and vegetables, which are rich in vitamin A and iron,
combating diseases notably malaria and measles, diarrhoea, HIV, intestinal
parasites. These may also have implication on chemical and pesticide use which
require proper sound chemical management.
6.3.4 HIV and AIDS
HIV/AIDS aggravate the health status and future prospects of Tanzanians. It
undermines the foundations of development and attainment of the Millennium
Development Goals and national targets. However, unsound use of chemicals,
drugs in particular aggravates the problem.
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